Hot Dog is a Baloney

One of the things that I’ve noticed most with the Monster’s verbal issues is the way he perserverates on certain phrases, even when they don’t make sense.

We had an incident, a while back, where he was repeating something that sounded like Spanish, but wasn’t anything I could decipher.  It turned out it was echolalia just churning back something he’d misheard from a Dora the Explorer game, once we heard the source and matched the cadence with what he was saying.

And then there’s the times where it’s genuine nonsense, and we’ve no idea what he’s trying to say.

The current phrase we hear frequently is “Hot dog is a baloney”… which we don’t know where he could have possibly heard something to assemble back into it.  I’ve tried insisting to him that “hot dog is a hot dog”, or telling him that he’s wrong (which is hard since we’re trying to avoid negative language, due to his documented issues in-class with internalizing negatives), but there’s been no change to the verbal pattern.  It’s just another phrase in his bucket, with insisting that he wants Sesame Street, or rotating through one or two foods that he might be willing to eat (but not at that moment).

Much of the time, I’m left to wonder if the phrases are more fill-ins for not knowing what else to be saying, or for some sensory stimulus that he’s unable to communicate to us.  Because he has been getting better about being distinct about what he actually needs a lot of the time, with asking for things to eat or drink, or for time with his iPad, or that it’s time to go to bed.  These phrases seem to crop up without any true initiator or consistency – he’ll say them while we’re in the car, or while he’s playing in the living room with his brother.

Just one more thing for us to puzzle through, I suppose.

 

In other news, we got back the results from the vet.  Sam has diabetes, as the wife had originally hypothesized.  New diet is underway, and we’ll make an appointment in the coming days to go back to the vet to learn how to shoot the furball up with insulin.

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